During the last decade the overall need for storing and classifying information has grown tremendously. Phenomenon has arisen not least on the Internet, the massive archive of information and, unfortunately, also disinformation. People tend to entertain themselves by surfing on the net and seek for news, interesting gossips, hobby related stuff, discussion areas, pen pals etc without forgetting the important issue of finding specific information on some current and bothering matter. Quite often certain pages and sites find their way into one's favorite or “top” link list by being stored as a so-called bookmark in the web browser. Subsequently the pages can be cleverly found by selecting corresponding links from the list of said stored bookmarks. Bookmarks typically contain a name for identification purposes and a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) leading to the destination site and/or page, and they are depicted as a line of successive link elements or sometimes as a more descriptive tree structure of nodes and leafs comprising said elements. When a number of bookmarks have been organized in the tree structure by some criteria, for example, a link class which refers to the subject matter of referred pages utilizing e.g. “news”, “sports”, “hobbies”, or “work” as node names, the pages can be easily and rapidly found from the connected leafs. FIG. 1 illustrates a scenario wherein a site map of a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) portal (Excite) has been presented as a hierarchical tree structure in addition to some other preferred, independent sites mentioned on the left. The scenario is congruent with the way bookmarks often are visualized in the browsers.
However, traditional web browsers do not classify or sort bookmarks without specific guidance, and the user has to execute the procedure manually by creating the tree structures and inserting the link elements into proper slots. Active web surfers search actively new interesting pages and their bookmark collection can easily grow up to several hundreds or even thousands of links. It is obvious that nobody can keep up organizing that huge number of bookmarks and eventually the manual sorting procedure is probably fully abandoned as a waste of time.
Sony-Ericsson has launched a new I-mode dual band phone called “MOVA SO 211i” containing a new feature called “e-mail ranking” which lists mail addresses in the order of frequency. Especially in mobile phones, which provide generally only limited data visualization means such as a small display to a user, the features, which help the user to quickly adopt the data they need from a bunch of other data, are vital.
One problem with manual sorting of information is founded on aforesaid fact that the generated tree structure typically reflects only factual bonds, e.g. division based on the subject matter: hobbies, news, work, main page vs. sub page relations etc, between the tree elements. Hence, the corresponding temporal or statistical interrelations are not saved. These temporal aspects, for example when was a certain web page last used, or statistical aspects, such as ranking of stored links by the total number of accesses made etc, may be in many cases more valuable to the information seeker than the factual one.
For example, the problem of Internet service management/bookmarking has been reported in many independent studies [1-3] showing that the preferred content has to be easily accessible for each user and useful services are revisited frequently as up to 81% of page visits in the wired web seem to be revisitations. Furthermore, manual management of bookmarks is difficult even in PCs with rich UIs (User Interface) and solutions should work over multiple services as the users access a wide range of specific services selectively instead of using just one portal. Moreover, users are also concerned about their privacy resulting low trust on pure server-side solutions. Many of the listed results originate from the fixed Internet usage. However the need for adaptivity in service management/bookmarking is particularly strong in mobile devices, which have limited UI and computational capabilities mostly due to their small size.